Mount Mao: The First Blessed Land, a Hermit Who Advised an Emperor by Post, and a Monument That Answers Firecrackers with a Bugle

There is a ridge about twenty kilometres southeast of Jurong, in the low hills where Jiangsu stops being flat, with three summits strung north to south and a high point of 372.5 metres. It is not big. It is, by the reckoning of a religion that took its geography seriously, one of the most important pieces of ground in China.

Daoism kept two ranked lists of sacred places: ten grotto-heavens and seventy-two blessed lands. Mount Mao is the eighth of the grotto-heavens and the first of the blessed lands — a claim you will see cut into the screen wall in front of the lower palace, six characters, no elaboration required.

And on the northern slope, on a hill called Wangmu, there is a 1995 war memorial where people set off firecrackers on purpose, because a bugle answers.

One mountain, two prefectures

Start with the administration, because it explains things that otherwise look inconsistent.

The ridge straddles a boundary. The western side belongs to Jurong, a county-level city under Zhenjiang; the eastern side belongs to Jintan, a district of Changzhou. The 5A designation, awarded in 2014, is for Jurong Maoshan Scenic Area, and the two temples on every itinerary are on the Jurong side.

The third one is not. Qianyuan Guan, on the Jintan side, is a convent staffed by women priests, and it is not administratively part of the Maoshan Daoist Academy — the two do not answer to each other. Three registered places of worship, one mountain, two cities, two institutions.

The mountain also had two earlier names — Goqu, the crooked-hook mountain, and Difei, the earth’s lung — before it took the surname of three brothers.

Three brothers who set up as doctors

The name Maoshan comes from Mao Ying, Mao Gu and Mao Zhong, three brothers who, tradition holds, came to Goqu Mountain during the reign of Emperor Jing of the Western Han, cultivated themselves here, treated the local sick, and eventually attained the Dao on this ground. The three peaks were renamed for them, and the mountain took the short form of their surname.

That is a legend, and it should be labelled one. What is not legend is how thoroughly the built landscape has been organised around it. In the main hall of the summit palace the Three Perfected Lords Mao are the enshrined deities. Immediately behind, a separate hall — the Hall of the Two Sages — is dedicated to their parents.

Give that a second’s thought and you have most of Chinese religion in one floor plan: a mountain where three men became gods, and where the building behind them exists so that the people who raised them are also owed incense.

The hermit who advised an emperor by letter

The figure who matters most here arrived in 492.

Tao Hongjing was a court scholar, a pharmacologist and a Daoist practitioner, and in the tenth year of the Southern Qi Yongming reign he resigned and withdrew to this mountain, styling himself the Hermit of Huayang. He did not withdraw from influence. Emperor Wu of Liang consulted him repeatedly, by correspondence, on matters of state — which earned him one of the best nicknames in Chinese history, the chancellor in the mountains: a man who had formally given up office and was still being asked what to do.

His output was enormous and mostly editorial. He gathered the Shangqing scriptures transmitted from Yang Xi and Xu Mi, sorted the authentic from the interpolated, and compiled the Zhengao — the declarations of the perfected — along with the Dengzhen Yinjue, the Zhenling Weiye Tu, and some two hundred volumes more. The Zhenling Weiye Tu is the strangest and most revealing of them: a ranked chart of the entire spirit world, organised as a civil service. He also produced a commentated pharmacopoeia that remained a reference work in Chinese medicine for centuries.

What he actually founded

Tao Hongjing is counted the ninth patriarch of the Shangqing tradition, which begins with the Jin-dynasty woman Daoist Wei Huacun, Lady Wei of the Southern Peak, and runs through Yang Xi, Xu Mu, Xu Xiang, Ma Lang, Ma Han, Lu Xiujing and Sun Youyue before reaching him.

What he added was a place. He and his disciples built the Huayang and Zhuyang lodges and a working religious community on this ridge, and the lineage that came out of it is called the Maoshan school — Shangqing, continued from a specific mountain. That is why the school carries a place name.

It worked. Through the Sui, Tang and Five Dynasties the mountain was at its height, producing masters — Wang Yuanzhi, Pan Shizheng, Sima Chengzhen — who were summoned to court by emperors who then, in several cases, let them go home.

The palace on the summit, the palace with the seal

The set of buildings later summarised as three palaces and five convents was completed across the Song and Yuan.

The Palace of Nine Heavens and Myriad Blessings sits on the highest peak and is therefore simply called the summit palace. Its present name was conferred by the Wanli emperor in 1598. Its axis runs south to north — spirit-official hall, scripture library, the Taiyuan Hall with the Three Lords Mao, then the Hall of the Two Sages — and behind that an ascension terrace with a stone gateway called the Three Heavens Gate, which stands at the 372.5-metre summit. There is a saying attached to this place about a single stick of incense at the top, and on festival mornings the queue for it is the reason the mountain has a crowd-control problem.

The Palace of the Original Talisman and Myriad Peace, halfway down, is called the seal palace and was completed in 1106, under Emperor Huizong of the Song. Together with the summit palace it forms what is now registered as the Maoshan Daoist Academy.

The Laozi is from 1998

The single most photographed object on the mountain is a seated Laozi at the seal palace, and it is younger than most of the people photographing it.

It was completed in 1998: thirty-three metres high, welded from 226 purpose-made bronze plates, weighing over a hundred tonnes. It is a genuinely impressive piece of fabrication and it is not an antiquity, and the reason to say so plainly is that on this particular mountain the distinction is the whole story.

What was left in 1983

Here is the part most write-ups skip.

After 1949 the three palaces and five convents were merged into a single body, the Maoshan Daoist Academy, and in 1983 the State Council named it one of twenty-one key Daoist temples permitted to reopen nationally. When clergy came back, this is what they found.

The summit palace and the seal palace still had some late-Qing and Republican-era building fabric and some old stone carving. The lower palace — Chongxi Wanshou Gong, the red temple, whose ancestor was the Huayang lower lodge that Tao Hongjing himself established, renamed under the Tang, again under the Song, and given its final name under the Yuan — had been submerged by a reservoir. Yuchen Guan had become a village of ordinary dwellings. The Qianyuan Guan site had been converted into a forestry base. Deyou Guan, Renyou Guan and Baiyun Guan were gone.

The lower palace has since been rebuilt, on a site east of the original, on the southern foot of Dinggong Hill northwest of the main peak, and in 2023 its forecourt hosted the opening of the fifth International Daoism Forum. Its screen wall carries those six characters: eighth grotto-heaven, first blessed land.

So the honest summary is that the fifteen-hundred-year-old thing on this mountain is a body of text and a lineage of transmission. The buildings are mostly a generation old. Both facts are true and only one of them is on the signage.

May 1938

The mountain’s second history begins on a specific order.

In May 1938, on instructions from the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee, the New Fourth Army moved east into southern Jiangsu behind Japanese lines and established an anti-Japanese base area centred on Mount Mao — the only one of the six major mountain base areas nationally that the New Fourth Army opened itself. The commanders named on the monument are Chen Yi, Zhang Dingcheng, Tan Zhenlin and Su Yu. The figures on it are five thousand-odd engagements and seven thousand dead.

The Maoshan New Fourth Army Memorial Museum was built at the foot of the mountain in 1985.

A monument built out of arithmetic

In 1995 the Zhenjiang party organisation built a monument on the summit of Wangmu Hill, funded by special party dues from more than three hundred thousand members, and completed it on 1 September. The name on it was written by Zhang Aiping, the former defence minister; a 114-character inscription is on the reverse.

Almost every dimension encodes something.

The base stands 3.13 metres, for the city’s 313,000 party members. The shaft is 28 metres, for the army’s first and second detachments and the eight southern provinces they were drawn from. The approach has 317 steps, sixteen metres wide, in six flights: six for the month of June, fifty per flight for the fiftieth anniversary of victory, and the last seventeen for the seventeenth — 17 June 1938, the day of the Weigang engagement, the New Fourth Army’s first victory after crossing the river. At the top, in blue granite, the army’s marking: N4A.

The total height is usually given as 36 metres, though some accounts — including a People’s Daily piece — give 31.3, which is the shaft and base added together. It is worth noticing that a monument this deliberately numerical has a disputed headline number.

Around it are a victory plaza, a memorial archway, bronzes of Chen Yi and Su Yu, a grove planted for generals, and a small statue of a bugler. That last one was added later, and for a reason.

The bugle

On Lunar New Year’s Eve, 1997, a man named Li Donggui, who lived beside the monument, set off firecrackers on the open ground in front of it, as one does at New Year. A clear bugle call came back out of the air above him.

The effect is repeatable and oddly disciplined. The bugle starts when the firecrackers start and stops when they stop. It works from a kilometre out along the monument’s central axis. Any sufficiently loud, sufficiently short sound will do it.

For years the explanations competed — the 317 steps, the shape of the hill, terrestrial magnetism — with no evidence behind any of them. Then Mao Dongxing, an associate professor at Tongji University’s institute of acoustics, tested points around the site and found something decisive: no bugle from roughly twenty metres off the axis, none from either side of the monument, none from behind it. That killed the terrain theory and the simple-resonance theory in one afternoon.

The account that survives is a two-stage reflection. The monument is hollow; a single sharp pulse excites higher harmonic resonance in the structure, which reflects downward onto the flights of steps; because each flight has a different gradient, each returns a different pitch after a different delay, and the whole arrives at the listener as a sequence of notes rather than an echo. In April 2006 the Shanghai Guinness office certified the monument as the building producing the most notes from a single pulse excitation. The museum’s deputy director puts it more simply: the step dimensions happen to return frequencies that match a bugle.

The obvious suspicion — that somebody installed a sound-activated speaker — is answered by the man who oversaw the museum’s construction, who points out that the place was bare hillside and that attracting tourists with a trick was not on anyone’s mind. And the folk version arrived immediately anyway: a young New Fourth Army bugler, seeing that the war was won, sounding the call. Hence the statue.

Hearing things on this mountain

Mount Mao now takes more than a million and a half visitors a year, and they are not all there for the same mountain.

Some are climbing to the Three Heavens Gate at 372.5 metres to burn the single stick of incense at the top, on a summit whose religious importance was established by a man who left government in 492 and then kept answering the emperor’s letters. Some are on the north slope with a packet of firecrackers, waiting for four seconds of brass.

It is a strange pairing and also a coherent one. For fifteen hundred years this ridge was the place where people came to hear what could not ordinarily be heard — revelations transcribed, spirits ranked into a bureaucracy, a hermit’s correspondence carrying more weight than a minister’s. Now the thing everybody comes to hear is a bugle that was never played, produced by six flights of stairs at different angles, and fully explained.

Both are the same mountain doing the same job. Only one of them has been measured.

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The LoreLens app can identify the halls, deities and inscriptions at Maoshan’s palaces and explain who is enshrined where.